Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2020

Abstract

COVID-19 has forced the world to increasingly rely on online services to continue daily life. Chief among these, for school, business, and fun, are videoconferencing services. Zoom has led the way, being used by millions, yet it has come to light that Zoom’s data privacy practices are far from ideal. The tracking of users and the sale of personal data has enormous consequences for users’ data privacy. Yet U.S. law provides poor protections for such risky behavior. U.S. data privacy law is fragmented on both the federal and state level, with federal law focusing on industry-specific protections and states each going their own ways. While this splintered framework does provide some protection for Americans against poor data privacy practices by Zoom and others, it is an unequal framework that provides different protections to different groups of Americans. Instead, Zoom’s privacy tribulations should be a call for Congress to follow the precedent of Europe and enact comprehensive data privacy legislation to equally protect Americans at the federal level from the improper use and sale of consumers’ data privacy.

Comments

HLRe: Off the Record, Vol. 10, Issue 3 (Summer 2020), pp. 76-89

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